IMPROVING NURSING HOME ADMINISTRATION: A REPORT OF AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION.

The article focuses on nursing homes that have expanded in the last twenty years to become a major component of medical care, although their rapid growth has been at the expense of quality standards. This article describes an attempt to improve one aspect of nursing home service through an educational program, the effects of which were measured. The initial problem for further research lies in the precise identification of the characteristics of nursing homes most likely to possess the most serious problems of adequate care. In the process of identifying such characteristics, knowledge would be gained concerning the organizational features of the homes that tend to create the problem to begin with. In order to design intelligent programs for increasing the quality of medical care in homes for the chronically ill and aged, investigation must be made of the differences of the level of care in terms of the organizational and economic features of the institution. In this way, educational programs can be developed which are realistic and directed to those institutions in greatest need. The investigation of the relationship between such a structural index as bed capacity and degree of ambulation and internal organizational features as they related both to present care and to the facilities to implement improved patient-care programs would, if the relationship were to be verified, provide a relatively simple method of selecting institutions for such educational programs.